Author: Claude, Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: A user on platform X successfully retrieved a Bitcoin wallet that had been locked for over 11 years, containing 5 BTC worth approximately $400,000 at current prices, by importing old computer files from college into Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude. Claude did not brute-force the password; instead, it located an earlier version of the wallet file among the massive amount of old files and fixed a bug in the open-source recovery tool btcrecover regarding the order of concatenating the password. This ultimately completed the decryption of the private key. The post garnered over 10 million views within 24 hours, but wallet recovery experts reminded that this was essentially AI-assisted file forensics, not password cracking.

A user on platform X, using the alias Cprkrn, posted on May 13 that the AI model Claude from Anthropic helped him retrieve a Bitcoin wallet locked for over 11 years, containing 5 BTC, valued at approximately $398,000 based on the day's price of around $79,600.

The post quickly ignited discussions in the crypto and AI communities, with views surpassing 10 million within 24 hours.

Changing the password under the influence of drugs during college; the wallet was locked for 11 years

According to Cprkrn's post on platform X, he purchased Bitcoin at about $250 per coin during college and subsequently changed his wallet password after smoking marijuana, forgetting the new password upon waking up.

The original password was quite personal... he disclosed it as "lol420fuckthePOLICE！*:)".

The wallet address is 14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6, formatted as P2PKH (a traditional address type commonly used in early Bitcoin). According to bitcoin.com reports, blockchain records show that after receiving 5 BTC on April 1, 2015, there were no outflow records from this address until earlier this week. Cprkrn had publicly lamented about the locked funds as early as August 2023 on platform X.

Over the past several years, Cprkrn attempted various methods to recover the wallet. He spent approximately $250 on commercial recovery services, all of which failed; he claimed to have tried about "70 trillion" password combinations and used common recovery tools like btcrecover and Hashcat to no avail. He waited until the price of Bitcoin exceeded $100,000 before deciding to initiate a serious new attempt.

Claude locates the old wallet file and fixes the recovery tool bug to complete decryption

According to bitcoin.com reports, the breakthrough happened after Cprkrn imported all the files from his old college computer into Claude. Claude pinpointed an earlier version of the encrypted wallet file (wallet.dat), which had a timestamp predating the fatal password modification.

At the same time, Cprkrn stumbled upon a handwritten mnemonic phrase a few weeks ago. However, this mnemonic could not unlock the current wallet file. Claude's key contribution lay in identifying the technical root of the problem: the open-source recovery tool btcrecover had reversed the concatenation order of the shared key with the user password during the decryption process. Claude corrected this logical error, reran the decryption process, and successfully extracted the WIF format private key.

Cprkrn shared a screenshot of Claude's output interface on platform X, and the wallet application subsequently showed that the 5 BTC had been successfully imported and the funds were transferred out on the same day of recovery.

Experts debate: AI-assisted forensics, not password cracking

The discussion sparked by this post is not entirely filled with admiration, as debates regarding Claude's actual contribution ensued.

According to Decrypt, a wallet recovery expert stated that Claude was "more like doing forensic classification rather than password cracking" in this process, with its core ability being to handle a large amount of unstructured historical data and identify clues related to the old wallet credentials. Decrypt also mentioned that some Reddit users felt Cprkrn's post exaggerated Claude's role.

From a technical standpoint, Claude did not bypass or crack the underlying encryption mechanism of Bitcoin. The entire recovery process depended on three prerequisites: old computer files in the user's possession, a correct mnemonic phrase, and a wallet file from before the password modification. What Claude did was establish connections among these fragments, diagnose the tool bug, and execute the corrected decryption process.

According to bitcoin.com reports, some users also expressed concerns about the security risks of uploading private key data to cloud AI services. The recovery itself relies on legitimate credentials already held by the user, but handing the encrypted wallet file to a third-party AI for processing still poses a risk of data leakage.

A third of Bitcoin is asleep in forgotten wallets

The background of this event is that a large amount of Bitcoin remains locked in wallets where early users have forgotten or lost their keys. According to BeInCrypto citing Glassnode data, about one-third of the circulating supply of Bitcoin is in a dormant state and has not moved for several years. Traditional recovery paths often require professional forensic companies or years of manual attempts, with high costs and low success rates.

The ability displayed by Claude—analyzing unstructured legacy files, understanding wallet software architecture from a decade ago, debugging logical errors in open-source tools—provides a new, lower-cost recovery path for holders of such "old wallets." However, whether this path can be generalized depends on whether users still retain the original files, mnemonic phrases, or other key fragments from that time.

Cprkrn concluded his post by stating that he intends to name his child after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Considering he has just gained around $400,000 out of thin air, this might not be such a crazy idea (laughs).